Water bottle for a dispenser

Abstract

A plastic, blow-molded, disposable water bottle adapted for use with a dispenser, said bottle having a basically spherical or elliptical shape, a footed base portion, and a unique neck geometry.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE DATA TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]Applicant claims the priority benefits of U.S. Provisional Patent Application 60 / 515,067, filed Oct. 28, 2003; U.S. Provisional Patent Application 60 / 542,167, filed Feb. 5, 2004; and U.S. Provisional Patent Application 60 / 554,037, filed Mar. 16, 2004. This application is a continuation-in-part of U.S. Design patent application No. 29 / 209,236, filed Jul. 12, 2004, pending.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]This invention relates to containers, and in particular, to a water bottle adapted for use with a dispenser.[0003]Presently, water is sold for home, office or retail use in large bottles. Bottles of this type usually include a generally cylindrical body, a generally frustoconical top breast at the upper end of the body, and a tubular filling and dispensing neck projecting upwardly from the central portion of the breast. Bottles of this type usually are inverted and installed on a gravity-type dispenser. In order to enable the bottle t...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0017]The present invention addresses this problem in two ways. The present invention provides an elliptical variation of the spherical shape. The elliptical shape will also provide a multi-directional curve shape. An elliptical shape can also provide a bottle with a central, horizontal diameter equal to the current standard for polycarbonate and PET returnable bottles, i.e., 10.6 inches or 27 centimeters. A spherical container with this diameter would be limited to about 2.5 gallons. The current market requires bottles to contain 3, 4 and 5 gallons of water in each bottle to provide an economically competitive bottle. The elliptical or prolate spheroid shape is a preferred evolution and preferred alternative to a perfect sphere because it achieves the volume requirement and still has spherical curvatures in two directions, vertical and horizontal, although the curvatures have different radii.

[0018]Another way to address the spherical shape packaging problem is by forming flat spots on the equator of the sphere, thereby reducing spacing between bottles without substantially penalizing the spherical-oriented design in terms of volume contained. The use of flat spots allows close packing of the bottles for maximum packing density. The sphere only has to be made slightly larger in diameter to return the capacity to its original value after making flat spots.

[0019]Another advantage of a spherical bottle with flat spots is that a guiding surface is created which will allow the bottle to maintain its orientation relative to filling, labeling, capping, palletizing, and other equipment which might benefit from the ability to maintain the orientation of the bottle. Furthermore, during shipment the bottles will not tend to rotate and scuff against each other. The flat spots will provide a larger contact surface and, therefore, a lower pressure point caused by inter-bottle contact and vibration during transportation. Since standard 5 gallon containers filled with water are quite heavy, i.e., 43 pounds, in the present invention, the preferred bottle capacity is between 3 and 4 gallons for reduced weight and ease of handling. The 4 gallon container with flat spots will have a flat spot to flat spot, side-to-side dimension which is the same as diameter of a traditional 5 gallon, cylindrical carboy, i.e., 27 centimeters or approximately 10.6 inches. Another advantage of a container with flat spots is that labels can be placed on the flat areas.

Problems solved by technology

The marketing system for the bottles filled with water includes delivery and pick-up services which require considerable investment and is considered to be quite labor intensive.

PET bottles, however, are not useful in a returnable mode because PET has limitations regarding temperature above 70 degrees C. / 160 degrees F. This does not allow the bottle made of PET to survive repeated washing at normal elevated temperatures required for sanitation purposes.

Furthermore, such bottles tend to be quickly degraded by the rigors of outdoor storage and exposure to high temperatures of delivery trucks in the hot sunlight.

Also, the sale of water in one-way 5 gallon PET bottles has been limited due to the weight of resin used in making the container and the consequent cost of the bottle when it is used once and then recycled.

However, early designs of one-way PET carboys did not achieve this improvement and required 450 grams for a 5 gallon carboy, i.e., 24 grams / liter, mainly because of vacuum problems associated with dispenser-mounted bottles.

Lightweight PET carboys can collapse under the vacuum created by water as it is dispensed from the bottle and can fall off the dispenser spilling water out of the bottle onto the floor.

However, this requires the carboy to be taller for the same volume and increases the amount of resin used.

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